Saturday, September 10, 2016

Is this all about a Turkish land grab from Syria?

US and Russia plan Joint Air Command to hit Terrorists in Syria

Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced an agreement on a Syria plan between the US and Russia late on Friday, which they said the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad had agreed to.

3. Russia will also stop its bombing campaign on all groups except Daesh (ISIS, ISIL)

4. Once these steps have been taken, the US will join Russia in bombing positions of the Army of Syrian Conquest (Jabhat al-Nusra), whose leader is loyal to al-Qaeda

What is now elaborated and a little unexpected is that if the agreement holds for a week, the US has agreed to establish a joint Air Force operations center to coordinate air strikes on Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) and on al-Qaeda in Syria (the Army of Syrian Conquest [ASC] or the Nusra Front).

As I noted last Saturday, a lot of officers in the US military do not like the idea at all of coordinating with Russia, and feel that Russia has taken advantage of past ceasefires to advance its interests and those of al-Assad on the ground.

Air Force Chief of Staff General David L. Goldfein has complained bitterly that Russian pilots in Syria have been reckless and endangered the American pilots. But Gen. Golden is just going to have to spend some time doing joint planning with the commander of Russian Aerospace Forces, Colonel General Viktor Bondarev.

With regard to broken ceasefires, to be fair, Russia holds that US-backed fundamentalist guerrilla groups have often broken past cease-fires and actually joined in with al-Qaeda to attack Russia and its allies and to grab up new territory.

One implication of the agreement is that the 30 or so CIA-vetted rebel groups, mostly Muslim Brotherhood, to which the US has funneled money and arms through Saudi Arabia, are being forced to break their alliance of convenience with Abu Muhammad al-Julani, who has pledged allegiance to 9/11 mastermind Ayman al-Zawahiri, and who leads ASC/ Nusra. Since both Russia and the US will be bombing the positions of al-Julani’s ASC/ Nusra Front, the remnants of the Free Syrian Army and other rebel groups such as if the rebels keep their battlefield alliance with it, they’ll be bombed alongside the al-Qaeda affiliate.

(Why the US is supporting allies, even allies of convenience, of al-Qaeda 15 years after 9/11 I’ll never understand; apparently you’d have to ask John Brennan at the CIA).

In return for joint US-Russian air action against Daesh and al-Qaeda, Russia agreed to a kind of no-fly zone in Syria– there are areas of Russo-American air dominance where the Syrian regime’s planes will not be allowed to fly. Hence Damascus won’t be able to send down barrel bombs on rebel-held areas at will anymore.

Moreover, the regime will have to let food and supplies into besieged urban quarters. Al-Assad and his henchmen have been starving rebel groups out and forcing them to relocate.

142 comments:

New York (CNN)Hillary Clinton told an audience of donors Friday night that half of Donald Trump's supporters fall into "the basket of deplorables," meaning people who are racist, sexist, homophobic or xenophobic.

In an effort to explain the support behind Trump, Clinton went on to describe the rest of Trump supporters as people who are looking for change in any form because of economic anxiety and urged her supporters to empathize with them."To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables," Clinton said. "Right? Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it.”

She added, "And unfortunately, there are people like that and he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric."Clinton went on to say that some of these people were "irredeemable" and "not America."Trump’s campaign quickly pounced on the remarks.

Deuce, Doug, Wio, myself, MOME, and many others here - all are irredeemable, deplorable, the kind of people who should never be allowed to rise again, a radical 'fringe' made up of “racists,” “sexists,” “homophobics,” “Islamophobes,” “anti-Semites,” “misogynists,” “xenophobics,” and “you name it” types.

So says Hillary.

Hillary calls ‘half’ of Trump supporters ‘basket of deplorables’ - 9/10/16 If you support Donald Trump, you are “irredeemable,” part of a “basket of deplorables.” A “kind” who should never be allowed to rise again. You are a “radical fringe” made up of “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobic,” “Islamophobic,” “anti-Semitic,” “misogynist,” “xenophobic,” “you name it” types

The ministry said in a statement, “The Falcons of Iraqi Air Force have conducted eleven airstrikes targeting the headquarters of the senior leaders of ISIS in the areas of Qaim, Akashat, Aana, Rawa and Hadelet al-Rutba.”

“These airstrikes resulted in the killing of over 100 ISIS terrorists, including ISIS Wali of Euphrates, ISIS Commando official and the suicide bombers recruiter,” the statement added.

The ministry also revealed, “The casualties also include the ISIS Media Official in Anbar, Military Official in Khalidiya Island, Transportation Official, Farouk Regiment Official, Emir of Farouk Regiment, Kharasani Regiment Official and Emir of the security detachment along with his assistant.”

Nothing says woman of the people like a political candidate who got filthy rich while serving in the Senate and State Department insulting millions of voters while surrounded by celebrities, right? Hillary Clinton shifted her attack from Donald Trump to his supporters at a fundraiser in New York City, putting “half” of them into “a basket of deplorables.” That’s a memorable turn of phrase, but will Hillary want to forget it?

Hillary Clinton didn’t mince words during a star-studded fundraiser in New York City Friday night, describing some Donald Trump supporters as “deplorables” who are hateful and bigoted.

“To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call ‘the basket of deplorables.’ Right?” she told donors at the LGBT For Hillary Gala, at which Barbra Streisand and Rufus Wainwright performed. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that and he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric.”

The Democratic presidential nominee added, “Now some of those folks, they are irredeemable. But they are not America.”

Later, Hillary campaign flack Nick Merrill tried to backpedal a bit from Hillary’s calculations. She was talking about the “alt-right,” not just reg’lar folks:

Nice try. Not even the alt-right thinks they’re half of Trump’s supporters. They are a small percentage of voters who happen to be on the same side of millions of voters who also want a disruptor rather than an establishmentarian. Their choice may or may not be wise, but the vast majority of Trump voters have nothing to do with the alt-right, and probably have never heard the term before. Salena Zito offered a very realistic depiction of the main ranks of Trump supporters in Pennsylvania two weeks ago:

While Trump supporters here are overwhelmingly white, their support has little to do with race (yes, you’ll always find one or two who make race the issue) but has a lot to do with a perceived loss of power.

Not power in the way that Washington or Wall Street board rooms view power, but power in the sense that these people see a diminishing respect for them and their ways of life, their work ethic, their tendency to not be mobile (many live in the same eight square miles that their father’s father’s father lived in).

Thirty years ago, such people determined the country’s standards in entertainment, music, food, clothing, politics, personal values. Today, they are the people who are accused of creating every social injustice imaginable; when anything in society fails, they get blamed.

The places where they live lack economic opportunities for the next generation; they know their children and grandchildren will never experience the comfortable situations they had growing up — surrounded by family who lived next door, able to find a great job without going to college, both common traits among many successful small-business owners in the state.

These Trump supporters are not the kind you find on Twitter saying dumb or racist things; many of them don’t have the time or the patience to engage in social media because they are too busy working and living life in real time.

Those are the people Hillary insulted with these remarks last night. Merrill’s smart enough to know it, too. This sneering, condescending, and insulting stereotyping of millions of voters perfectly encapsulates the Clintonian quarter-century, especially with their above-the-law antics since leaving the White House. And that’s why most candidates stick to insulting each other, and not voters.

In a way, it’s reminiscent of Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remarks from four years ago. My friend and mentor Hugh Hewitt spent this morning making that argument on Twitter:

Should it get the “47 percent” treatment? Yes, perhaps even more deservedly than Romney; his (misguided) remarks were about specific tax and safety-net policies, not accusing tens of millions of Americans of bigotry simply for not supporting him. Will it? No, and for one unassailable reason — the media will never start that same kind of feeding frenzy around Hillary. They’ll cover it initially, perhaps even noting what a foolish misstep it was as Don Lemon did in the CNN clip, but very quickly the media narrative will turn to whether Republicans are “pouncing” and “overplaying their hand.” Don’t be surprised if that shift occurs as soon as tomorrow morning’s news shows.

That doesn’t mean that Team Trump has to let it go, though. If they’re smart and well organized, they will soon start pushing “basket” memes of their own — ads that feature the kind of people about which Salena reported, normal folks who don’t want business as usual in Washington and sneering elites insulting them. Candidates for the Senate and House should do the same, and the RNC should make it a major theme of the cycle. If played properly, this could be the biggest gift basket Team Hillary will provide Republicans in 2016.

QuirkEnterprises out of Detroit, Michigan has already announced a new product, a hand woven 'Basket For Deplorables' that one can use and reuse to shop at the 2nd hand stores, or to pick up junk around the home, or to use for recyclables, '47% off regular price in orders of 5 or more', shipping not included.

This week could be the point of no return for the faltering Clinton campaign. The elitism that is a defining characteristic of the contemporary political establishment has lured the campaign into a strategic blunder. They are in a panic with Trump closing the polling gap in battleground states.

So as panicked people sometimes do, the Brooklyn Brain Trust made a decision from the gut. They are scared of the Trump supporters, and they presume that their voters are, too. So scared that it makes sense to them for Bill and Hillary Clinton to publicly disparage a substantial fraction of the American public....

How else to explain Bill Clinton disparaging “coal people”?

“We all know how [Hillary’s] opponent has done well down in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky,” the former president told the crowd at the Greater Pittsburgh Coliseum. “The coal people don’t like any of us [Democrats] anymore.”

But last night’s “basket of deplorables” speech by Hillary Clinton to a wealthy gay and lesbian group should become a catastrophe.....

Deuce, Doug, Wio, myself, MOME, and many others here - all are irredeemable, deplorable, the kind of people who should never be allowed to rise again, a radical 'fringe' made up of “racists,” “sexists,” “homophobics,” “Islamophobes,” “anti-Semites,” “misogynists,” “xenophobics,” and “you name it” types.

Finally, a hint of self-awareness. Hallelujah. It's a small step but it is progress.

Hillary’s “Let them eat cake moment.” If I were managing Trump, I would have tweeted: “there is a god.”

Hillary Clinton's comments at a star-studded fundraiser in New York City that half of Donald Trump's supporters are a "basket of deplorables" are getting slammed by the Trump campaign as a sign of "how little she thinks of the hard-working men and women of America."

GOP vice presidential candidate Mike Pence told a forum of social conservatives Saturday that Clinton's comments display a lack of respect for the millions of people who support Donald Trump for president.

Trump's supporters "are not a 'basket' of anything," Pence said at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C. "The truth of the matter is that the men and women who support Donald Trump's campaign are hard-working Americans, farmers, coal miners, teachers, veterans, members of our law enforcement community, members of every class of this country who know that we can make America great again," he said.

“They are Americans and they deserve your respect,” Pence added, as if addressing Clinton directly.

Almost certainly. It would be understandable to assume so based on the totality of Turkish actions (and inaction) throughout this war. While Erdogan may despise Assad, his biggest concern in this conflict has always been with the Kurds. He wants to keep the various Kurdish factions divided. It's easy to assume he wants a buffer zone between Turkey and Kurdistan.

Going beyond the current talks about a temporary truce between the major parties and focusing on the US part in the broader war, it appears (to me) that the US is once again on the verge of stabbing the Kurds in the back.

Up until October of 2015, the Kurds were the US' most reliable allied force in Iraq/Syria. Even without the heavy arms they desperately sought and which the US refused to directly provide, they were the key allied ground force in northern Syria and the one holding their ground in northern Iraq. They were the only group making measurable progress there. The rest of the US effort was rather feeble.

Then the Russians entered the fray. The US was forced to take a more active role in the war to avoid embarrassment if for no other reason. The US pretty much left Assad and Russia free to do their thing with little more than a bit of grumbling.

Then Turkey finally joined the fray. The precipitating events that changed their direction was that ISIS was now losing despite secret support from Turkey and that ISIS turned on Turkey with major terrorist attacks there. However, it's hard to say whether even this would have been enough to get Turkey to become active on the allied side if it didn't also provide Turkey with the opportunity to break up the growing Kurdish confederation that then stretched across most of Turkey's southern border with Syria.

And what was the US reaction? More grumbling.

The Kurds have been used and abused by the West (primarily the US) throughout the 20th century, the last time in 1991 when we urged them on in the fight against Saddam and then left them hanging as he exacted his revenge. It now appears our perfidy towards the Kurds will continue into the 21st century as we use them and then kick them to the curb to pacify our 'ally'.

It stinks but it's nothing new. You would think the Kurds would know better by now; although admittedly, ISIS gave them little choice.

Yet, it was under Ike's administration that the concept of the 'Domino Theory' was developed. It was Ike who supported the French with modern arms there. It was Ike who was sending hundreds of billions of aid to Vietnam to build up both their army and their nave. It was Ike who supported the dictator Diem. It was Ike who was the first to send advisors into Vietnam. I

There is one obvious truth, if you put Americans in harm's way you need to be willing to support them. Once you start putting 'advisers' into a country, the growth of more support troops and infrastructure is pretty much inevitable. That is the real 'domino theory'.

“The people who support Donald Trump’s campaign are hard-working Americans,” Pence added. “Let me just say from the bottom of my heart: Hillary, they are not a basket of anything, they are Americans and they deserve your respect.”

“No one with a record of failure at home and abroad, no one with her avalanche of dishonesty and corruption, and no one with that low opinion of the American people should ever be elected president of the United States of America,” he said.

The Republican nominee’s campaign has latched on to Clinton’s remark, with Trump tweeting that the comment was “insulting” and campaign manager Kellyanne Conway calling for an apology. The Clinton campaign has defended the remark, characterizing it as in line with Clinton’s past arguments that there are significant racist and xenophobic elements among Trump’s base.

While Trump has fought back against the characterization with outreach in the African American community, Pence has made a point in speeches of saying that Trump wants to “make America great again for every American regardless of race and creed and color.”

Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina said on Friday it was "stunning" that the Justice Department had reportedly provided immunity to a computer technician who wiped Hillary Clinton's private email server despite orders from Congress to preserve its files.

"This is prosecutor 101. You don't give immunity to the person who actually robbed the bank," Gowdy said on Fox News.

On Thursday night, The New York Times reported that the Justice Department had given immunity to Paul Combetta. The technician previously conceded to authorities that he deleted Clinton's files while "aware of the existence of the preservation request and the fact that it meant he should not disturb Clinton's email data," according to the report.

"They gave immunity to the very person you would most want to prosecute, which is the person who destroyed official public records after there was a subpoena and after there was a prosecution order," Gowdy said.

But whether Clinton is correct is a factual matter. Let’s look at the polling data.

A survey taken this May found that about two-thirds of Trump supporters believe Obama is a Muslim.

The same poll found 59 percent of Trump supporters believe Obama was not born in the United States.

These views are incorrect but are also racist and xenophobic. They are rooted in the idea that a black man with an atypical name could not be a U.S.-born Christian but must be a secret Muslim born in Africa.

So when Hillary Clinton says half of Trump supporters hold bigoted views, she may be understating the issue.Survey data shows that significant chunks of Trump supporters hold even more extreme beliefs.

A national poll of 2000 people taken in January by YouGov found that one-third of Trump supporters believe the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, one of the most shamefully racist programs in American history, was a good idea.

Clinton also mentioned homophobia. A PPP poll of South Carolina voters in February found that a substantial portion supported banning LGBT people from the United States.

In the same poll, 16 percent of Trump supporters admitted they believed that “whites are a superior race,” while an additional 14 percent said they were “not sure.”

The national YouGov poll from January found that 20 percent of Trump supporters disagreed with Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed southern slaves.

The polling data reveals that there is a substantial number of Trump supporters that are bigoted, intolerant, or worse.

Is percentage, as Clinton suggested, about 50 percent? That depends on how you . . . .

The white supremacist Alt-Right movement has grown over the last eight years or so, incubated in racist forums like StormFront and meme-loving corners of the internet like 4chan and 8chan. Its members generally share a disdain for political correctness, feminism, zionism, Jews in general, immigration (especially Hispanic and Muslim immigration), and anyone who criticizes them for holding these views.

www.thedailybeast.com/...

This is the election that introduced 99% of Americans to a group of people living in their midst who they’d never heard of before—the “alt-right”, who make up a significant portion of Donald J. Trump’s voting base. If Trump’s campaign can be taken as an indicator, if and when he is elected these are the kinds of people we can expect to see elevated to higher positions in the United States government and implementing policy.

Our media have jumped all over themselves trying to describe who or what the “alt-right” is, but most of them seem to agree that these folks are all about promoting their “white identity,” which, fairly translated, means their "white superiority.” There is also general agreement that these “alt-righties” are taking their cues from older Baby Boomer and Gen X racists who made the leap at the turn of the Millennium from obscure shortwave radio conversations and furtive meetings in each others’ basements to the much more public-friendly Internets and “social media:”

The alt-right has its origins in the white nationalists and “white identity” movements of the 1990s, but in the past year, it has found a home on Twitter and other social media, where adherents traffic in white supremacist and anti-Semitic memes; threaten and harass female, nonwhite, and Jewish users: and decry “white genocide,” defined as multiculturalism.

The comfort and safety of the Internet has been a boon like no other for white supremacists. They can find like-minded soulmates and “hang” with people as racist as themselves long into the night, trading witty observations, venting their frustrations, and honing their intellectual pretensions. There’s even a “white people dating site.”

And like any successful movement, leaders have emerged. Three of the most visible ones are Jared Taylor, founder of the white supremacist “American Renaissance" website, Richard Spencer, President of something called the “National Policy Institute,” described as a “white supremacist think-tank,” and Peter Brimelow, President of a non-profit called VDARE, that warns against the “polluting of America by non-whites, Catholics, and Spanish-speaking immigrants.”

But the single most galvanizing event in the history of this unabashedly “modern” white supremacist movement has been their warm embrace by the Republican Party in the personage of Donald J. Trump. Not only has Trump provided aid and comfort to these racists, he has exponentially increased their media exposure, most prominently through the right-wing news site, Breitbart News. Trump’s hiring of Breitbart's CEO white nationalist-promoting Steve Bannon as his campaign manager effectively sealed the deal between Trump and this “digital supremacist” generation:

The site says it had 31 million visitors in July. And in March, it ran a piece describing Taylor, Spencer, and their ilk as “fearsomely intelligent,” and praising them for speaking truth to power or whatever.

On Friday afternoon these three gathered in the Willard hotel ballroom half a block from the White House for their very first press conference:

In a windowless room in a swanky hotel half a block from the White House on Friday afternoon, three of the most visible leaders of the Alt-Right movement held a two-hour press conference to discuss their affection for Donald Trump and their hopes for a white homeland.

One of the speakers, hardcore Trump supporter Jared Taylor, authored a column last August for the white supremacist publication American Renaissance, titled “Is Trump Our Last Chance?:” in which he wistfully imagined the future under a Trump Presidency in which racism would gain a new “respectability:”

A change in tone would be as dramatic as a change in policy because a president and his cabinet have tremendous influence that goes well beyond policy. They can put a subject on the national agenda just by talking about it. They can make it respectable just by continuing to talk about it. Actually looking at the pros and cons of immigrants could open the door to looking at the pros and cons of different groups of people. White, high-IQ, English-speaking people obviously assimilate best, and someone in a Trump administration might actually say so.

During Friday's conference Taylor explained the philosophy that sustains these folks:

Jared Taylor, who founded the white supremacist American Renaissance site, explained the Alt-Right as predicated entirely on the belief that some races are inherently superior to others—the movement, he said, is “in unanimity” in rejecting “the idea that the races are basically equivalent and interchangeable.” There are genetic differences in race that make some races more ethical and intelligent than others, he said. That’s what the Alt Right is all about.

“They also differ, as a matter of fact, in the patterns of the microbes that inhabit their mouths,” he said.

Yep. He actually said that.

Richard Spencer, another conference speaker, has in the past explicitly spelled out the need to establish ”white identity:”

"Race is real. Race matters and race is the foundation of identity," said Richard Spencer, one of the group's leaders and activists.

Spencer advocates for an all-white “homeland.” During yesterday’s Press Conference, he made it clear that the “homeland" he envisions would not include Jews:

Spencer in particular fixates on the homeland idea.The Alt-Right needs to aspire to something, even if that dream won’t come true in his lifetime—and that means they should aim to build an ethno-state for just whites. And Spencer made it clear that white-only means Jews aren’t invited. They have their own identity, and it isn’t white-slash-European, and that’s that.

Like Taylor, Spencer applauded Donald Trump for breathing new life into a movement that had previously been limited to slinking about in the shadows, but he and all of the speakers took pains to stress that that their existence was not dependent wholly on Trump’s candidacy:

"It is in a way projecting on to him our hopes and dreams," said Spencer, a man who has said before he dreams of a white ethnostate. "We have not been made by Trump, but we want to make Trump and we want to imagine him in our image."

The key takeaway from the press conference was that now that they have seen their star rise thanks to Trump, these people have no intention of crawling back under their rocks:

The overwhelming message was that the alt right is not going away even if Trump loses, or if Trump wins and . . . .

This is nothing new for Hillary. She has been talking of Trump's bigotry and his appeal to the racist fringes for some times. Her latest comments merely seeks to quantify it. Likely a mistake as the more specific you get on this stuff the more risk you run.

I suspect her latest charges were in response to the falling poll numbers. Even though she has huge advantages with certain groups especially blacks and Hispanics these same groups can pose problems for her if they don't come out and vote.

With Hispanics, her poll numbers have remained constant. The problem is her advantage hasn't grown, certainly not to the extend you would think given Trump's problems with this group.

With blacks it could be the young black voter that has her worried. A few days ago, the NYT reported that Hillary support from young blacks is rather lackluster. They don't trust her and even if they prefer over Trump the question becomes will they be enthusiastic enough to get out and vote for her.

Some post upstream had suggested she's getting desperate. She might have some reason for concern.

Hillary Clinton employs Professional Pollsters; if I know she's winning by nine or ten, I'm sure they do.

Even in that goofy CNN/ORC Poll, that was taken over a freakin' holiday weekend, she was up 13 with College Educated Whites. That is Huge, and it fits in with all the other major polling that we've seen. She's up by at least 9, right now - and, the debates are coming.

Trump is winning the White Non-College vote, according to the pollsters, by about 23%. But, you have to subtract 5 points from that for the "white wife lying to husband (this is a real thing) effect." So you have Trump picking up 18% of 37%, or 6.7% of Total Vote.

No, it became obvious after studying the Census, and Registration Data that White Non-College was a larger percentage of the electorate than was picked up in the polling data, but that the cohort was, also, not voting nearly as Republican as they were telling the pollsters (including the exit pollsters.)

Romney was thought to have won Whites by 20%, but after studying the vote in rural, exurban, and suburban districts, it's obvious that he only won them by 15%.

If there is any "Rufus Gut-Smoothing" going on it's that, knowing many white men, and more than a few white women, I Am hypothesizing that the majority of the fibbing is coming from white wives telling their hubbies,

If there is any "Rufus Gut-Smoothing" going on it's that, knowing many white men, and more than a few white women, I Am hypothesizing that the majority of the fibbing is coming from white wives telling their hubbies,

We Know the fibbing is going on. We know that a Net of 20% of that cohort told pollsters they were voting Republican, when they were really voting Democratic.

We know that, within every cohort, Men tend to vote more Republican, and Women tend to vote more Democratic. We know that married people tend to say things to each other that are designed to "keep peace in the family."

If the vote is turning out more Democratic than would be predicted by the pronouncements of men and women standing next to each other talking to exit pollsters, it doesn't seem all that likely that it's the men that are claiming to be Republican voters, closetly voting for Dems.

We know that, within every cohort, Men tend to vote more Republican, and Women tend to vote more Democratic. We know that married people tend to say things to each other that are designed to "keep peace in the family."

The logic is impeccable. Definitely what you should be building a poll prediction on. Better get Gallup and Rasmussen on the line.

Given the fact that these two clowns try to outdo themselves in the 'making an ass of yourself" sweepstakes, only a fool would try to predict this election two months out especially based on voting patterns from past elections.

Hillary Clinton will carry the AA, Hispanic, Other by about 80-20 (same as Obama) for a Net of 60% of 27% or 16.2% of Total Vote

Hillary, right now, is Winning the White College Educated by 12% of 36%, or 4.3% of Total Votes.

Trump is winning the White Non-College vote, according to the pollsters, by about 23%. But, you have to subtract 5 points from that for the "white wife lying to husband (this is a real thing) effect." So you have Trump picking up 18% of 37%, or 6.7% of Total Vote.

That comes out to Clinton +13.8

Would I bet that it ends up that much? Naaah, but if the election was today, I wouldn't want to bet much on the "Under 9.5."

Memo to candidates: Stop generalizing and psychoanalyzing your opponents’ supporters. It never works out well for you.

The latest to fall into that trap is Hillary Clinton. The Democratic nominee, at a New York fundraiser Friday night with liberal donors and Barbra Streisand, said "half" of Trump supporters fit into a "basket of deplorables," while the other half are people who feel the government has let them down and need understanding and empathy.

The comments have rocketed around the Internet, infuriated conservatives and threaten to once again throw salt in the wound of the American cultural divide in a presidential election that has seen vitriol and insults, fueled by Donald Trump, that have become the norm. The remarks also remind of inflammatory remarks in recent presidential elections on both sides — from Barack Obama’s assertion in 2008 that people in small towns are "bitter" and "cling to guns or religion," to Mitt Romney's 2012 statement that 47 percent of Americans vote for Democrats because they are "dependent upon government" and believe they are "victims," to his vice presidential pick Paul Ryan's comment that the country is divided between "makers and takers."

”I know there are only 60 days left to make our case — and don’t get complacent, don't see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate comment and think well he's done this time. We are living in a volatile political environment.

"You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? [Laughter/applause]. The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.

"But the other basket, the other basket, and I know because I see friends from all over America here. I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas, as well as you know New York and California. But that other basket of people who are people who feel that government has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they are just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”

Clinton's remarks, like Obama's in 2008, smacked of liberal elitism — liberals talking to liberals about a group of people they don't really know or hang out with, but feel free to opine about when talking to each other.

It's always problematic to speak in generalizations, something liberals would be the first ones to point out. At the point in which you hear yourself saying that you might begin talking in "grossly generalistic terms," it's probably best to re-think what's coming next. That's especially true when you don't have data to back up your point.

The biggest problem in Clinton’s statement is that she said “half” of Trump supporters are racists, xenophobes and otherwise bigots. Half means equal or near-equal parts. There’s no data to support such a specific number.

There was another tweet I saw that was funny but I can't seem to find it again. I ran a google search trying to find out who the twitter users actually are and I ran across it.

The tweet by was someone in leadership on the Trump campaign. It was sent under the hashtag #BasketofDeplorablesandProud.

My first instinct was to start looking for a lawyer who specializes in copyright infringement. However, after looking at the picture that was attached to the tweet, I thought what the hell. It was pretty funny.

I wish I knew how to post it here. It was a shot, a poster really as in some movie promotion for an action adventure movie, of Trump and his crew (Pence, Juliani, Christie, Trumps sons, Ben Carson, what looked like one of the Ninja Turtles with blond hair, and a few others) all dressed in black mercenary gear with dust and smoke rising around them as a bomber dropped bombs in the background. Trump was all in black with a beret, a handgun, and a huge belt buckle with a skull on it. Across the front of the poster it read The Deplorables.

(IraqiNews.com) Nineveh – A security source in Nineveh province declared that more than 180 ISIS members have fled from Mosul, along with their families, toward the Syrian city of Raqqa.

Sharing more information with Iraqi News, the source revealed, “Yesterday, more than 180 ISIS members fled, along with their families, from al-Sukar neighborhood in central Mosul toward the Syrian city of Raqqa.”

“The fleeing ISIS members were riding vehicles carrying the plates of Nineveh province.”

-- Near Mara, a strike engaged an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed a fighting position and a mortar system.

Strikes in Iraq

Fighter and remotely piloted aircraft conducted six strikes in Iraq, coordinated with and in support of Iraq’s government:

-- Near Qaim, a strike engaged an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed three vehicles, two buildings, a cargo container and a tractor-trailer.

-- Near Hit, a strike destroyed an ISIL vehicle.

-- Near Mosul, a strike engaged an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an assembly area, a vehicle, two mortar systems, a weapons cache, a tunnel entrance, six rocket rails and suppressed a mortar system.

-- Near Ramadi, a strike destroyed three ISIL vehicles and an anti-air artillery system and suppressed two mortar systems.

-- Near Sinjar, two strikes engaged two ISIL tactical units; destroyed a tunnel, two assembly areas, a mortar system, a fighting position and suppressed a mortar position.

Last night I was ‘grossly generalistic,’ and that’s never a good idea. I regret saying ‘half’ — that was wrong.

This is clearly not an apology, it’s a quibble over numbers. She’s not retracting the statement only the math. And yet, the media seems eager to give her credit for walking this back. Here’s Ron Founier writing at the Atlantic:

Clinton didn’t apologize, which for some reason is hard for her to do, but she did say the remark was wrong and she didn’t try to excuse it – even as she accurately described the choice voters must make.

Fournier makes three specific claims in this sentence, two of which are wrong. It’s true she didn’t apologize. It’s not true that she said the “basket of deplorables” remark was wrong. She explicitly said “half” was wrong. But half was not the remark.

To put this in some perspective, if Mitt Romney said, ‘I regret saying 47% — that was wrong’ I’m fairly certain Democrats would have called that a quibble. The point of the outrage back then wasn’t that Romney’s figures were off a bit, it was that he had suggested some large swath of Americans were indolent and relying on the government for support.

Moving on, Hillary definitely did try to excuse her remark. In fact, the entire rest of her statement is one long excuse:

But let’s be clear, what’s really ‘deplorable’ is that Donald Trump hired a major advocate for the so-called ‘alt-right’ movement to run his campaign and that David Duke and other white supremacists see him as a champion of their values…

Notice what Hillary is doing here. She made a comment about something approaching 25% of American voters and then waves David Duke and the white supremacists (read: KKK) like a red flag. She’s made this point before but, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the KKK has about 5,000 to 8,000 members. To be clear, that’s 5,000-8,000 too many in my view. I genuinely wish the number was zero, but it really is a tiny fringe when compared to the size of the electorate Hillary was invoking last night.

I think Allahpundit is on to something about this being a strategic move. Hillary’s camp would clearly rather have the media discussing this than another week devoted to her email or the future of the Clinton Foundation. Here’s what appeared on Clinton’s official blog the Friday night:

…a lot of journalists are failing to hold Trump accountable and grading him on a curve, while forcing Hillary Clinton to meet an entirely different standard.

So instead of most voters hearing about how Trump is empowering a new generation of white supremacists, for instance, and having that news placed in a proper, terrifying context, they read stories of Hillary and Trump lumped together.

And that makes our jobs in this election all the more important. We have to do what the media won’t do. We have to speak so loudly that every voter in America hears us.

“Do you want to know what will happen as your body starts shutting down?”

My mother and I sat across from the hospice nurse in my parents’ Colorado home. It was 2005, and my mother had reached the end of treatments for metastatic breast cancer. A month or two earlier, she’d been able to take the dog for daily walks in the mountains and travel to Australia with my father. Now, she was weak, exhausted from the disease and chemotherapy and pain medication.

My mother had been the one to decide, with her doctor’s blessing, to stop pursuing the dwindling chemo options, and she had been the one to ask her doctor to call hospice. Still, we weren’t prepared for the nurse’s question. My mother and I exchanged glances, a little shocked. But what we felt most was a sense of relief.

During six-and-a-half years of treatment, although my mother saw two general practitioners, six oncologists, a cardiologist, several radiation technicians, nurses at two chemotherapy facilities, and surgeons at three different clinics—not once, to my knowledge, had anyone talked to her about what would happen as she died.

There’s good reason. “Roughly from the last two weeks until the last breath, somewhere in that interval, people become too sick, or too drowsy, or too unconscious, to tell us what they’re experiencing,” says Margaret Campbell, a professor of nursing at Wayne State University who has worked in palliative care for decades. The way death is talked about tends to be based on what family, friends, and medical professionals see, rather than accounts of what dying actually feels like.

James Hallenbeck, a palliative-care specialist at Stanford University, often compares dying to black holes. “We can see the effect of black holes, but it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to look inside them. They exert an increasingly strong gravitational pull the closer one gets to them. As one passes the ‘event horizon,’ apparently the laws of physics begin to change.”

What does dying feel like? Despite a growing body of research about death, the actual, physical experience of dying—the last few days or moments—remains shrouded in mystery. Medicine is just beginning to peek beyond the horizon.

* * *

Until about 100 years ago, almost all dying happened quickly. But modern medicine has radically changed how long the end of life can be stretched. Now, Americans who have access to medical care often die gradually, of lingering diseases like most terminal cancers or complications from diabetes or dementia, rather than quickly from, say, a farm accident or the flu. According to the Centers for Disease Control’s most recent figures, Americans are most likely to die of heart disease, cancer, or chronic pulmonary lung disease

For those who do die gradually, there’s often a final, rapid slide that happens in roughly the last few days of life—a phase known as “active dying.” During this time, Hallenbeck writes in Palliative Care Perspectives, his guide to palliative care for physicians, people tend to lose their senses and desires in a certain order. “First hunger and then thirst are lost. Speech is lost next, followed by vision. The last senses to go are usually hearing and touch.”

Whether dying is physically painful, or how painful it is, appears to vary. “There are some kinds of conditions where pain is inevitable,” Campbell says. “There are some patients that just get really, really old and just fade away, and there’s no distress.” Having a disease associated with pain doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily endure a difficult death, either. Most people dying of cancer need pain medication to keep them comfortable, Campbell notes—and the medicine usually works. “If they’re getting a good, comprehensive pain regimen, they can die peacefully,” she says.

When people become too weak to cough or swallow, some start to make a noise in the backs of their throats. The sound can be deeply disturbing, as if the patient is suffering. But that’s not what it feels like to the person dying, as far as doctors can tell. In fact, medical researchers believe that the phenomenon—which is commonly called a death rattle—probably doesn’t hurt.

Ultimately, because most people lose awareness or consciousness in their last few hours or days, it’s hard to know for certain how much patients are suffering. “We generally believe that if your brain is really in a comatose kind of situation, or you’re not really responsive, that your perception—how you feel about things—may also be significantly decreased,” says David Hui, an oncologist and palliative-care specialist who researches the signs of approaching death. “You may or may not even be aware of what’s happening.”

A week or two after we spoke to the nurse, my mother sank into a state where she was rarely conscious. When she was awake, it was only the most basic part of her that was there: the part that told her legs to move to get her to the bathroom, the automated steps in brushing her teeth and then wiping the sink afterward. Her mind turned away from her children and husband for the first time.

I wanted to know what she was thinking about. I wanted to know where her mind was. Being at the bedside of an unresponsive dying person can feel like trying to find out whether someone is home by looking through thick-curtained windows. Is the person sleeping, dreaming, experiencing something supernatural? Is her mind gone?

For many dying people, “the brain does the same thing that the body does in that it starts to sacrifice areas which are less critical to survival,” says David Hovda, director of the UCLA Brain Injury Research Center. He compares the breakdown to what happens in aging: People tend to lose their abilities for complex or executive planning, learning motor skills—and, in what turns out to be a very important function, inhibition

“As the brain begins to change and start to die, different parts become excited, and one of the parts that becomes excited is the visual system,” Hovda explains. “And so that’s where people begin to see light.”

Recent research points to evidence that the sharpening of the senses some people report also seems to match what we know about the brain’s response to dying. Jimo Borjigin, a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan, first became intrigued by this subject when she noticed something strange in the brains of animals in another experiment: Just before the animals died, neurochemicals in the brain suddenly surged. While scientists had known that brain neurons continued to fire after a person died, this was different. The neurons were secreting new chemicals, and in large amounts.

“A lot of cardiac-arrest survivors describe that during their unconscious period, they have this amazing experience in their brain,” she says. “They see lights and then they describe the experience as ‘realer than real.’” She realized the sudden release of neurochemicals might help to explain this feeling.

Borjigin and her research team tried an experiment. They anesthetized eight rats, and then stopped their hearts. “Suddenly, all the different regions of the brain became synchronized,” she says. The rats’ brains showed higher power in different frequency waves, and also what is known as coherence—the electrical activity from different parts of the brain working together.

“If you’re focusing attention, doing something, trying to figure out a word or trying to remember a face—when you’re doing high-level cognitive activity, these features go up,” Borjigin says. “These are well-used parameters in studying human consciousness in awake humans. So, we thought, if you’re alert or aroused, similar parameters should also go up in the dying brain. In fact, that was the case.”

In her last couple of weeks, when my mother’s mind seemed to be floating off somewhere else most of the time, she would sometimes lift her arms into the air, plucking at invisible objects with her fingers. Once, I captured her hands in mine and asked what she’d been doing. “Putting things away,” she answered, smiling dreamily.

This half-dreaming, half-waking state is common in dying people. In fact, researchers led by Christopher Kerr at a hospice center outside Buffalo, New York, conducted a study of dying people’s dreams. Most of the patients interviewed, 88 percent, had at least one dream or vision. And those dreams usually felt different to them from normal dreams. For one thing, the dreams seemed clearer, more real. The “patients’ pre-death dreams were frequently so intense that the dream carried into wakefulness and the dying often experienced them as waking reality,” the researchers write in the Journal of Palliative Medicine.

Seventy-two percent of the patients dreamed about reuniting with people who had already died. Fifty-nine percent said they dreamed about getting ready to travel somewhere. Twenty-eight percent dreamed about meaningful experiences in the past. (Patients were interviewed every day, so the same people often reported dreams about multiple subjects.)

For most of the patients, the dreams were comforting and positive. The researchers say the dreams often helped decrease the fear of death. “The predominant quality of pre-death dreams/visions was a sense of personal meaning, which frequently carried emotional significance for the patient,” they report.

In patients’ final hours, after they’ve stopped eating and drinking, after they’ve lost their vision, “most dying people then close their eyes and appear to be asleep,” says Hallenbeck, the Stanford palliative-care specialist. “From this point on … we can only infer what is actually happening. My impression is that this is not a coma, a state of unconsciousness, as many families and clinicians think, but something like a dream state.”

The exact moment at which this happens—when a person enters a dream state, or even when a person starts dying—is hard to pinpoint.

That was true in my mother’s case. In the early hours one morning after it snowed, I was keeping watch with two of my mother’s friends in her library, the room where we’d moved her to accommodate a hospital bed. She seemed peaceful, and in the dim light of the morning, we stood at different points around the bed, listening to her raspy breathing.

She made no dramatic moves or indications that she was about to leave us. She didn’t open her eyes or sit up suddenly. She took a last, slightly louder breath, and died.

“It’s like a storm coming in,” Hallenbeck says. “The waves started coming up. But you can never say, well, when did the waves start coming up? … The waves get higher and higher, and eventually, they carry the person out to sea.”

Magnificent Ronald and the Founding Fathers of al Qaeda

“These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” — Ronald Reagan while introducing the Mujahideen leaders to media on the White house lawns (1985). During Reagan’s 8 years in power, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in a US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union. We repeated the insanity with ISIS against Syria.